The Globe and Mail posted an intersting article on February 5, 2009 entitled "Salt shortage gives people the slip". Remember it is not the act that you salted when it snowed, you should always salt your property on a "regular basis".
Read on:
If
you slip and fall on ice outside your local shopping mall in the next
few weeks, here's something to ponder on the way down: a continent-wide
shortage of road salt, induced partly by government hoarding, could be
to blame.
While there is a near-limitless supply of salt under the ground,
North America's major producers have been unable to shovel it out fast
enough to meet the overheated demand wrought by two overchilled winters
in a row. As a result, snow-shocked governments have used their buying
power to rope off most of the supply, leaving small private contractors
struggling to keep retail, office and industrial properties ice-free.
"People should be aware that conditions may not quite be as good as
they've been used to, and to wear appropriate footwear and handle
themselves with a little bit more caution," Jim Monk, a snow-removal
contractor in Markham, Ont., warned yesterday.
Mr. Monk's company, whose 250 clients include Fortune 500 companies
with Toronto operations, is among the many to face difficulty securing
salt from resellers around Canada's largest city, and whatever is
available has, in some cases, doubled in price.
To cope, they are rationing salt and plowing more often, which also
drives up costs, he said. Some contractors are eating those expenses,
while others ponder the equally unsavoury option of raising their fees
during an economic downturn. All of this is playing out against the
backdrop of rising safety and liability concerns as salt mounds shrink.
"The situation started with last winter," Richard Hanneman,
president of the Salt Institute, a trade group that represents the
continent's largest producers, said yesterday from his office in
Alexandria, Va. Transportation departments in several northern states,
particularly Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin, "were scared to death" by
severe snowfalls and responded by immediately buying more, and then, in
an unprecedented move, drastically increased their orders for this year.
Since government contracts typically penalize producers if they fail
to deliver the requested amount, suppliers had to set these larger
orders aside, reducing the size of an already shrunken remainder, Mr.
Hanneman said.
"We actually sold more highway salt in the first six months of 2008
than we did in all of 2007," he said. In normal circumstances, the
industry is able to "refill the pipeline" over the summer, but the
increased orders - in some cases, more than 50 per cent larger than in
the past - made that impossible.
"In essence, those three state DOTs [departments of transport in
Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin] alone sucked up more than a million extra
tons," Mr. Hanneman said. And this winter, snowfalls are already 20 per
cent higher in those states than they were a year ago.
Salt producers responded by taking on these orders from state,
provincial and local governments, creating "tremendous pressure" on
private contractors such as Mr. Monk.
Salt imports from Latin America have surged in the interim, offering
some hope of relief. Meanwhile, the Sifto salt mine in Goderich, Ont.,
the world's largest, is undergoing an expansion that will add 10 per
cent to North America's production capacity.
All of which is welcome in the long term, but cold comfort to people such as Mr. Monk in the midst of another severe winter.
"In certain situations, there's absolutely no substitute for salt,
particularly in freezing rain and sleet," he said. "If we don't have a
ready supply of salt available, that ice isn't going anywhere."
The best hope, albeit an uncertain one, is for warmer weather in the coming weeks and a milder winter next year.
Referred by Matt Lalande
If you have had a slip and fall accident please do not hesitate to contact matt.lalande@haber-lawyer.com